This paper presents an empirical account of the diversity of regulatory developments over the past fifty years, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding this diversity. We build upon the "varieties of capitalism" and the "regulatory capitalism" literatures which provide methods for...

This paper models the relationship between innovation and sustained economic growth through as being mediated by institutions that calibrate a 'structure of technological production' analogous to capital-based models of the structure of production. Our framework discusses two types of capital:...

From 1790 to 1891, the United States prevented foreign authors from obtaining domestic copyright protection, implicitly subsidizing a domestic reprinting industry. With foreign works a “free” and unprotected resource, American publishers created a system of voluntary norms, known as “trade...

I describe an assignment for a history of economic thought (HET) course, "The Most Interesting Economist in History," modeled off of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Students vote in head-to-head matchups between economic writers by era for whom they find to be more "interesting" and...

Public goods are traditionally classified according to an exogenous, technological definition of possessing the characteristics of nonrivalry and nonexcludability. This paper takes a more endogenous approach, where goods are defined by the political purposes that specific actors have revolving...

Traditional wisdom has long argued that copyright laws are necessary to ensure that expressive works, such as books, music, and films, are produced by deterring people from consuming them for free. Recently, a new method of financing expressive works has emerged, known as crowdfunding, where...